


Bushel and a Peck

by Humanities_Handbag



Series: Bushel and a Peck [1]
Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: A Bushel and a Peck, ADORABLE TIMES FOR ALL, Bog is a single dad, Broken Arms, F/M, Lot's of feels, Overdose, Sick Children, Single Dad AU, Single Parents, Single Parents Dating, and it's just adorable, dawn as a pediatric nurse is a dream, drug usage, hospital visits, hospital visits leading to true love, hurt comfort, not anything too bad, plenty of guac, single dads dating again, spicy salsa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 21:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6771559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Humanities_Handbag/pseuds/Humanities_Handbag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story in which wives leave husbands and husbands miss wives, children are had and then children are lost, a tree is a nuisance, an arm is broken, a nurse is perky, and love is found.</p><p>AKA the Single Father AU no one asked for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bushel and a Peck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GoldWerewolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldWerewolf/gifts).



> A gift for goldwerewolf, who has been more than amazing. This is all yours girl. And I really hope that it’s enough to give back to how much you’ve helped and supported myself and this fandom. 
> 
> And a huge shout-out to thatchickwiththeheadphones. This may be a mere spicy on the salsa scale, but girl does it feel good to go back into the angst that we found our home in.
> 
> Bonnie Clyde and the Counselor are at it again.

The day Bog’s wife left him it had rained.

She’d been gone before he’d had much of a chance to do anything about it and he still wondered if he could have in the end. Her side of the bed was as haunting as it was surreal, and he’d forever deny that she had even occupied it, forever dreaming that perhaps it would have been better for his hopes and his heart, emptied and hollow and abused, if she’d never been there at all.

It hadn’t been the first time that he’d found the bed empty. But something told him it was the last.

He’d done the best he could, really. To find her. His car was an old, greasy thing that smoked and rumbled, but he’d started it up and circled the block, looking out the windows at all the spots he knew she went. But the park was hosting a children’s party and the library was closed for renovation and the old warehouse sitting by the lake on the border of town was empty except for a few birds and used condoms. It was raining, and his black umbrella was covered in rips and did little, but he still held it over his head and shouted her name.

She never answered.

He didn’t expect her to.

And eventually, when the clouds were still rolling in and lightning flashed a ceremony across the sky, he knew that he had to give up.

So he did.

“She’s gone, ma,” he tells Griselda later that night, sitting on his front steps, looking at an old man walk slowly down the cracked sidewalk, flooded through with heavy rain.

“She was gone last month too, honey.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“So this might be another one of those.”

“No.” There’s a little canopy over the stoop, and it drips a waterfall. He reaches out his hand and lets a few fat drops fill the life line. “This ones it.”

“You done with her?” He won’t admit that he heard the excited tone that lingered there. The hopefulness behind years of watching and waited and holding her breath. But he can’t deny that its there.

“Naw. I think… I think she’s done with me. I’m not…” He’d touched his face, looking back into the glass door. “I’m too hideous to love, ma…”

“Oh… _sweetie_.” she says. “You know that’s not-”

“I tried to make her stay.”

“I know you did, honey.”

“I… I thought she was happy enough.”

“I’m sure she was.”

“She never…” His hand dropped from his face, and he wanted to woner what hurt more. That she stopped loving him, or that she never had.

“Sweetheart…” His mother cooes again.

 _She was always done with you_ , he hears.

He hangs up the phone right after that and goes inside. 

* * *

They’d met where he worked.

A small tattoo parlour just a few steps away from his apartment. He’d been working there for years. His own body covered in an assortment of different shapes and colors, long strands of ivy curling up and cover his arms and neck and chest. He resembled a Goblin from a far off fairy tale that parents told their children to be wary of,

Apparently, though, no one had told her.

Though no one had told her much of anything.

“I want something that’ll make me look tough,” she told him, pulling her Styx shirt off over her head and dropping it to the floor beside her, standing before him with a body toned and managed, red bra out in the open. “What do you recommend?”

He gives her a lyric from a Joan Jett song on her shoulder in calligraphy that would make the founding fathers weep.

( _You don’t own me. I’m not just one of your many toys. You don’t own me. Don’t say I can’t go with other boys._ )

She observes it in the mirror with her good body and red bra, still puffy and pink, and while he’d been grabbing the gauze and instruction packet to give her, she’d pinned him to the counter and told her to use her as much as he wanted. And Bog, from the second he set his own blue eyes on her wild violet ones, had been completely lost.

“I think I love ya,” he tells her months later when they’re in his bed, stripped down, his fingers playing notes over the tattoo on her shoulder.  Her red bra rests somewhere on the other side of his room, as dreamy and wonderful as the day he’d first set eyes on it. “Ya know that? That I love ya more than anythin’ in this world.”

“Of course you do, Bog,” she’d told him.

The next morning she’d been gone.

But she always came back. So he wasn’t worried. 

He knew she would. She always tended to leave. When they’d first met, it had been normal. Popping in here and there, going about their days. And then the absences had become longer. More drawn out. She’d smelled like other men. Had waved it off as paranoia. 

“You’re seeing things.”

He wasn’t.

But he loved her.

And love, as he’d been inclined to believe, was blind.

So he kept loving her blindly. And that was _fine_.

Just _fine_.

He’d proposed too many times to count, but had always been turned away. So he’d waited for her. _Waited_ and _wanted_ and _gave up_. And then one day;

“We should get married,” she’d told him one day after she’d disappeared for a few days. He’d looked up from his cereal bowl, tapping the metal spoon against the rim.

“You’re back.”

“Did you hear me, Bog?”

“I did. But you _left_.”

“I had to think.” She had long, gold hair that had gone tallow after too many hits. She was a wreck. But she was _his_ wreck.

( _that excuse was getting far too old_ )

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Think.”

She nodded. Then she stole his spoon and scoops out the last bite. “I think we should get married,” she says between chews, picking up his bowl and dropping it into the sink. “There’s a courthouse nearby and I know that there’s a discount for dresses at the strip mall this Wednesday.”

“Why would you need a dress?”

“Shit, Bog, really know how to make a girl feel special.”

She ends up stealing thirty dollars from his wallet sometime after midnight and buys a ten dollar maxi dress from the mall. It’s bright blue, and it matches his eyes, but it doesn’t match her. He doesn’t ask where the other twenty dollars went to. He doesn’t have to.

They got married the next day.

It had been a wedding of convenience. They’d like each other. He’d been too old to find anyone else. She’d been too high to care about it. They’d had a few quickies under a picnic table in the local park that was more needles than it was wood-chips. And after a few months it had just made sense.

He told his mother the day after.

“Why couldn’t ya have waited for someone else?”

“There isn’t gonna be anyone else, Ma. And I love her.” He’s sitting outside on the porch of an old Motel where they’d honeymooned. Had _still_ been honeymooning. She was inside asleep on the bed. He’d left to smoke. “I’m almost forty, ma. I don’t have forever ta find someone. And she… she loves me.”

“Love waits, son. She never waits for you.”

“But I _can’t_ wait anymore, ma.” He takes a deep drag. “Sides, the tax cuts are good. And I can at least keep her out of trouble.”

“She _is_ trouble, Bog. If anything you fell right into it.” There’s a sigh. “Are ya at least gonna get me some grandbabies?”

He’d swallowed and looked up at the moon. “Honestly… no. I don’t think- not with her. It wouldn’t be safe. For her or the bairn.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Sorry, ma.”

“It’s your life, son. You know I love you though, right.”

He hadn’t cried. Wouldn’t have cried.

It would have been stupid if he’d cried.

“Yeah, ma… I know…”

“Good.”

It isn’t long after that that Bog decides to play along with the idea of married life. They’d both had their own apartments still- her stuff scattered at times all over his place. Toothbrushes, a lacy thong hanging on the bedpost, sticky notes balled up with numbers he didn’t know for people he didn’t care about.

It’s one day, looking over his apartment, her lying back on the couch watching the last few episodes of a cooking show marathon, that he suggests moving.

“We should have a house.”

She paused the show mid chop, craning her head over a pillow to look at him. “What?”

“A house.” He said again. “All married people have houses.”

“Not all of them.”

“The best ones do.”

She’d snorted. “You’ve been watching too much Hallmark shit again.”

“You’re not saying _no_.”

“I’m not saying yes, either.” She presses the play button, and a screaming chef comes back onto the screen. “Give me a few day to think, alright Bog?”

She decides that night. And by the end of the month they’re selling their small, crappy places that are very much separate and moving into a small, crappy place that’s theirs.

They choose one of the smallest places on the market after they’d been told more than enough times (with a few very pointed glances) that it was just below their price range. It wasn’t a _nice_ house. And the fact that he lived there didn’t make it any nicer. A little, squat, two story with a basement mostly taken over by a boiler that jolted and hissed and an attic filled with junk from whoever had lived there before. He painted the outside a foul grey because the color had been on sale and he’d needed most of his funds for actual art projects and tattoo sketches that were duct taped to their kitchen walls that called for bright colors.. Most of the rooms had come with peeling wallpaper already installed.

It was hardly a fairy tale ending. They slept on a matress on the floor, their kitchen was stocked with disposable cups and paper plates and ramen. And his wife had been eager to start gardening because her therapist at the time had told her that it would help channel her emotions. Or whatever the fuck that meant. He’d thought it was a shitty idea.

“My wife’s a drug addict,” he’d reminded them one day, wound up tighter than he’d ever been before. “Not a fuckin’ _day time special_.”

It didn’t matter in the long run. She was lousy at it. So their yard was askew with old, broken thorn bushes and dead, brittle ivy that made the whole place look haunted and empty. Which, coincidentally, started the rumor that ran through the entire neighborhood about ghosts and ghouls and an old witch and a young bride that had been beheaded, her blood smeared around the perimeter so unwanted visitors would be cursed to an eternal and fiery doom.

It had been named the Dark Forest once that rumor had gotten enough headway, and it wasn’t unusual for him to be shopping at the supermarket, catching the name being muttered by a young child or a group of people in line shying away from them while the checkout assistant blindly scanned whatever was passed to her. There were stories about an old man who was murdered there in the back room (false), a witch who ate children in the basement (false), and a ghost that circled the house at midnight every third Wednesday of the month (false, but entertaining).

No one knocked on their door at Halloween. No one noticed when they didn’t put up lights at Christmas. No one invited them to potlucks and block parties.

They were left alone.

And for a time, Bog decided that he could do without love if it only meant that he was left in peace. “This is okay, right?” he asks her one night after she’d come back from one week away. He didn’t ask her where she’d been. He never did. He just wound his long limbs around her body, kissing her neck in the dark of their room. “Yee’re happy?”

“Are you?” she’d ask in a voice that was as knowing as it was final.

He didn’t answer. Just kissed her neck again and tugged her close. She smelled sour and old. And when she turned away from him, his chest meeting her back, it didn’t go unnoticed that they barely fit together.

He’d adored his wife.

His wife had not adored him.

A few days after, she was gone again. And he didn’t worry. Because she always came back. No matter who she went to or what they had, she’d always come back.

She’d always come back…

Always.

And then, one day,

(always)

she didn’t.

* * *

There are exactly five calls that change Bog’s life forever.

The first one comes late on a Tuesday afternoon. His car was out of service, so he’d walked to work. By the time he’d gotten through his front door it was raining outside. The sky had gone dark and angry, and his awful umbrella was still doing nothing. His keys are in his hand, and he’s flipping through them, when his phone buzzes. He doesn’t know the number, so he lets it go to voicemail.

By the time he’s got his door unlocked, they’ve called again.

“Mr King?” He shakes out his umbrella and leans it against the front door.

“Mmph.”

“Mr. Ki-”

“Aye?” Bog walks towards the kitchen. Outside the window the rain is still falling and the dead ivy snaking into the backyard, climbing the broken, dented chain link fence, moves along with every drop. He grabs the kettle from a cabinet and searches through others to find the spare teabags he has left.

He’s out of milk. He’ll have to do without.

“I’m calling from my office down in the city. I’ve just received word from a few informants that you were the last remaining relative of a Mrs. King.”

“Aye. That’s right.”

“And when was the last time you saw her?”

He thinks back. Fills the kettle with water. Turns on the gas stove. “About… ten months ago?”

“You don’t know?”

“She leaves a lot.”

“You’re her husband.”

“She was mah wife,” he says, doing his best to keep the iron from his voice. “I very much doubt I was ever her husband.”

The woman on the other line huffs. “Well, be that as it may, I’m sorry for bothering you, but on paper you _are_ _her husband_.” She hardly sounds sorry. More inconvenienced. He has to wonder if she’s always like that. As if everyone in the world is constantly in her way. “Something came up there was no one else to call.”

Yes, he decided with a roll of his eyes. She was.

“Mrs-”

“ _Miss._ Matron.”

“Sorry.”

The kettle begins to sing happily. He reaches for a mug. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, Mr. King-”

“Ye haven’t given me anything to be serious about, Mrs. Matron.”

“ _Miss_!”

“Right. Miss.”

A snort. She was either tired of him out tired of this. Or both. Either way, her voice couldn’t have gotten colder, so it merely steeped in its own ice when it snapped, “We found your wife.”

He stops. The kettle starts to scream. He turns off the heat and leans against the stove. “What?”

“You are married, aren’t you?”

“… technically?”

“Well, we found your wife.”

He puts her on speaker after that, laying the phone on the counter between an odd collection of rubber bands and a stack of unopened bills. His hands come up to scrub at his face. “Where…” he says eventually, Where did she go, he wants to ask.

“She was found with a friend.” It’s the most he’s going to get, he knows.

Still-

“Was he a friend or-” ( _or have I been replaced_ ) “-or family?”  

“A friend,” she says again, in that ‘stop asking questions’ way. “She’s in the hospital now. Her friend left. He’s not documented though. He didn’t stay for the chance. But we have her here-”

“Which hospital.” The words this time go unspoken, but he knows she can hear them.

“St. Andrews. On Park and Euclid.”

“I know it.” He picks up a rubber band and stretches it between his fingers. “Is she-”

“She’s not dead,” the woman spits. “But she’s certainly not good.”

“Meth or coke?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

“Meth.” He can hear her shuffling papers in the background. “Though I wouldn’t expect you to care.”

“I care. I’m just not surprised.”

“Well, if it’s anything to you, we’re expecting her to make a full recovery. The doctors are already making arrangements with the local rehab centers.”

“She’s been to all of them. They won’t work.”

“She’s your wife, Mr. King. A little _compassion_ might do you some good.”

He adds another rubber band to his hand, twisting and turning it through the fingers until it makes a strange and constricting cat’s cradle. “I told you. I care. But we’ve done all of them before. She did everything. We did, I mean. And… she saw the therapists. And the doctors. They know her by name there now.” He adds yet another rubber band. His fingers are starting to go an ashy grey. “Nothing works.”

“We’ll just have to see about that.”

“You can do as you like.”

“Mr. King.” She pauses. Shuffles through some more papers. “It would seem as if she’s been gone long enough for you not to know some things.”

“What are ye-”

“She was pregnant, Mr. King.”

The rubber bands snap. He curses when one of them slicks his wrist, leaving an angry red mark, the others falling in their own ways across the floor and the counter. He shakes out his hand, staring wide eyed down at the phone still counting up his minutes innocently on the illuminated screen.

(6:34) 

(6:35)

“… _what_ …”

(6:36)

(6:37)

“… what d’ye mean…”

(6:38)

(6:39)

“… she… she had… _she had_ …”

(6:40)

“… that’s… that’s _impossible_ …”

(6:41)

“What… _what d’ye mean_ -” He sounds different to himself. Thicker and unsure and strange. Like metal after it’s been heated- red hot and sparking and rough to the core, melting at the edges under heat of _impossibleimpossibleimpossible_. 

“I mean she was pregnant, Mr. King.”

“I bludy well know what a child means! But-”

(6:55)

“If you’re asking if it’s yours-”

“ _Of course I’m fucking asking if it’s mine_. Mah wife packs up and leaves and now _you call_ an’ tell me tha’-”

“Mr. Bog, please. It wouldn’t do well for you to scream at me.”

(7:14)

She takes a slow drink of something, as if they’re not talking over the phone about a newborn he never knew of from a wife who had long since given up on the prospect of him. She smacked her tongue against her teeth, and the sound grated against the speakers. 

“No.”

“… _oh_ …” 

(7:15)

(7:16)

“We’re not sure it is yours. We’ll do some more tests. But as of now, we’re sure that it isn’t. We had your DNA on file from a previous visit and from the looks of it, nothing matches up.” She takes another sip. “Not sure who the father is, though. That much is certain. He’s not in our system and your wife seems to not know who she slept with at what day.”

He doesn’t know why. But his chest deflates. “Oh.” he says. And then, “oh.” There’s no chair at the counter, so he takes the phone and slides down onto the floor, his back against the worn wood cabinets. “Then why did you call me?” _Are they really this cruel?_ Part of him wonders if they’re about to spring a trick or one liner. _She’d never love you enough to have your child! You’re too hideous! Why would any baby be lucky enough to carry about your face!_

(7:43)

“It may not be yours, Mr. King. But… there are other issues that involve you. That’s why I’ve called.”

“Are there.”

“Yes. They’re confident that it can’t stay with her. Not like she is.” The woman sniffed. “She was in the middle of a high when she gave birth. Didn’t feel a thing.”

(8:15)

He sits straighter. A knob digs into his spine, but he ignores it. “ _How’s the baby_ -”

In all the Hallmark movies he’s seen, this is usually the moment where the cheery Social Worker tells the parent not to worry. That their child is perfectly fine. To expect meeting their newest soon, resulting in heartwarming music and a montage of parenthood mishaps and growth and understanding. Usually they’d tell him congratulations, you have a son, and he’d pass a ball back and forth in the backyard all day, learning about this and that. Being the father his own could never be.

But his social worker is one without cheer, and the word he lives in is filled with old drugs. And his backyard is home to his wifes terrible gardening skills and broken glass. And he has to wonder if he’s meant to be wonderfully happy or horribly worried.

“We’re not sure, Mr. King.” His breath catches. “It’s premature. And whatever was in your wife’s system did its work. Not sure what the damage is. All we know is that the child can’t go with her. And we don’t know who the father is. So until we can figure that all out-”

He’s up again, leaning back against the counter top, searching underneath stacks of bills and magazines and different sorts of files. _Keys, keys, where are his bloody keys._ “- you need me to take-”

“We need you to step in. As far as we’re concerned, this is _temporary_. We would have just sent it to a home, but you are your wife’s next of kin. If you don’t want it-”

“I _do_.”

It’s about the most ridiculous thing he could ever say.

He lives in the neighborhoods haunted house. He blacks out his windows and tends to dead plants to keep people away. They chose a neighborhood far from schools and parks just to keep out the kids. He’s always been _fine_ with children, but his future had been happily void of them. His too terrible, too fearful, too hateful, too resentful, too hideous-

He had (did) adore his wife.

His wife didn’t feel (never had felt) the same.

He had come to terms with being too hideous to love. Of never being enough for her. Of never being enough for anyone. Of knowing that love was chaos and he didn’t want any part of it. Not from her. Not from anyone else.

And he had been alright with the prospect of no children. Because, at the end, he was realizing that he really didn’t have much (love) to give.

And now he’s scrabbling to find his keys to rush to a hospital to pick one up.

He looks around his house filled with sharp sculptures and hot plates and edges and broken, dirty things. Then he looks down at himself, all spindly and spiderish and tall and bony.

He puts down his keys.

(9:08)

“I don’t know… I’m not really sure I’m the right… fit.”

“Neither do I,” she snaps. “But right now it’s either you or a home. And I can’t promise you this kid’ll last to even get to an orphanage.” He swallows. “You can say no,” she told him with the sort of tone that told him she really didn’t care either way. “You’re just the best option.”

(9:12)

(9:13)

(9:14)

He looks around his small home one more time. It would just need a little bit of cleaning up. And he could sand down the edges. And really, he’d been looking at moving eventually…

He picks back up his keys.

“When can Ah-”

“Not until next week. Doctors are still doing tests. You can come around noon on…” she flips through something. A calendar. “Next Wednesday. And please do your best to at least wear something half decent. We already have one drug induced parent here. We don’t need another.”

“Right.” He puts down the keys again. Curses himself for being that overeager.

(9:30)

Or maybe it’s just fear.

(9:32)

“We’ll send someone over afterwards, of course. It might be me, though. Seeing as I’ve been apparently given the curse of this case. Just to see how you and the child are getting on. Make sure you haven’t stuck it in a closet or boiled it or something. “Either way, it’s not yours. So if you’d rather give up parental duties we can find the actual father. Won’t take us long. I’m sure if we ask around at a few of the rehabs someone will remember a woman dragging a few men into the electrical closet.”

He swallows. Knows, from the way she is, that she’s hardly joking. “No. No I’ll take over.”

“Of course you will. We’ll see you next week, Mr. Bog.”

“Okay. Next week.”

(9:59)

She doesn’t say goodbye. She hangs up. And that’s that.

He’s about to put the phone down when something strikes his mind, and he’s hitting the redial, jamming the phone against his ear. She answers quick enough, with a sign and a formal greeting, but he doesn’t let her finish.

“Ya keep saying _it_.”

She stops in the middle of her name and goes silent. “Excuse me?”

“You kept saying _it_. The baby. What’s the baby.”

“Really, Mr. Bog, I thought you’d just pick up the child and-”

“ _What is it_.”

The Social Worker sighs. “It’s a girl.”

He swallows, thick and terrible. A girl. He lives in the land where primroses die quick around the border of his home, where shards of glass are used to invoke fear in neighbors, where he is as distrustful of love as he is of the world, and they want him to take a child. A little girl. “Are ya sure that this is a good idea?”

“I told you my opinion already, Mr. Bog.”

“Ah know ye did it’s just…”

_**My wife left me** _

_**She left me and she left me with a baby** _

_**I’m scared** _

_**I’m angry** _

_**I’m furious** _

_**I’m lost** _

_**I’m** _

_**I’m** _

“I’m not sure if I’m the right person.”

**_I’m done with love_ **

“You’re the only person, Mr. Bog. It’s either you or a home. You choose.”

He swallows again, his throat almost too tight to breathe. _Chaos. This is chaos. This is chaos. This is-_ “Okay.” **-chaos**.

“Wonderful.” She’s at the edge of whatever frayed rope he’s held her on, and he can hear her snapping, but he doesn’t give a damn. “Now, if there’s nothing else, I actually have work to do. Good day, Mr. Bog.”

* * *

“She had a daughter, mum,” he says into the phone later that night, sitting in bed in just his boxers. The shower is running, had been running for fifteen minutes, but he hadn’t gotten in yet. He’s on fire and freezing all at once, and he thinks he might very well throw up. “She had a daughter when she went away. With- oh who bludy well knows. She just had one. And now there’s no father in sight and they’re dropping her off with me. Or… I mean… that was a bad way of putting it…” He drops his head into his hand. “She left me, mum. She _left_ me.”

In the background, his mother is not so distressed. “I’m gonna have a _grand baby_!”

“No, ma. You’re not.”

“But _son_ -”

“You’re as much a grandmother as I am a father. This is just… temporary.”

“Says who!”

“Says the _state_.”

“The state is wrong. You’re the father. She’s _yer_ wife. She had _yer_ daughter. You’re taking home _yer_ child.”

“You make it sound so _final_.”

“Pah! You think when I had you I just shoved ya back in?”

“ _Mom_!”

“Well, did you?”

“Ye chose ta have me, Ma. I didn’t…”

“You didn’t what? Didn’t want a _kid_?”

“I… I don’t know…” Which was true enough. He hadn’t really thought it through. Ever. Bot wasn’t a man of chaos. He’d been cheated out of love. And now he was being given the option of having to give too much of it. “I’m not sure I’m quite ready fer that. I despise love, despise her, and she thinks the best way to pay me back is through givin’ me a _child_.”

“You’re having a tantrum, son. Ya don’t despise love.”

“I do.” He scowled at his knobbly knuckles, tracing the scars left behind from childhood accidents and welding tools. “I despise it. We both know that she was gonna leave me-”  
  
“You were hopeful, sweetheart.”

“Yeah, well now I see just how stupid that was. I’m too hideous-”

“Stop right there.”

“Well, I am. She probably found herself a Hercules and shagged him up in the back of a second rate chain restaurant and thought it was better than doin’ me with the lights off!”

His voice had gotten louder the more passionate he’d become and he’d finished off with a bold sort of wave of his arms. But once it’s over, once the statement is out, the passion fizzles away. And all that’s left is a sad sort of feeling. A truth from self deprivation that’s been pent up for too long. They’re quiet for a long time. In the background the shower stutters, water running for too long. He sighs through his fingers. Knows, somehow, that he’s crossed a line. “Mum?”

“You know I love ya, right, Boggy?” She sounds like she’s close to crying, but he knows better than to think it’s out of sadness. If anything, she’s planning six different ways of sticking his hand under a ruler for everything he’s said. Still…

“Yeah, mum. I know.”

“And yer a idiot most days, you know that, too?”

“Yes, mum.”

“Good. Now go take your shower. I don’t want you to pick up your daughter smelling like a goddamn cockroach.”

They never speak of it again.

* * *

A week feels more like a year, and by the time the day arrives, he’s fairly certain that had his mother not called fifteen times that morning, he’d have already bought himself a one way ticket to Mexico and started a new life.

He’s a coward. And he’s not ashamed to admit it.

But soon his car is puffing its lazy way across the roads, watching the world whip by, unimpressed by the monumental events going on inside of it. The hospital is off a road that’s more smog than it is anything else, and he cuts through the drizzle that had started early that morning, his wipers leaving little trails behind, making it hard to see through the distortion. He blasts Joan Jett the entire way, singing along with gusto, hoping that a few rounds of _I Love Rock’n Roll_ would do something for his nerves.

He sits in the lot, listening to the last notes of the album with his head planted against the steering wheel.

Joan Jett leads out with a strong melody.

_Ah, now I don’t hardly know her - but I think I can love her - Crimson and Clover_

He switches off the old stereo with enough force to break the buttons.

“What the hell am I doing?” he asks the empty seat beside him, as if it carries all the answers, buckled in and safe. He has a car seat in the back, a requirement that they had told him nearly every day, pestering until he’d emailed over pictures of the damn thing. It’s ugly. Second hand, a little torn up, but stable and safe. “ _What the hell am I doing_?”

When neither the space up front or the seat in back tells him, he gives up. Opens the door. Walks out into the drizzle.

Ms. Matron arrives on time ( _always on time_ ), and stands before him, lip curling in distaste. It’s the first time he’s seeing her and, he realizes, that she looks like she sounds. A scant woman of thin, wiry frame. Her hair is pinned back into a tight bun that pulls at her face and props up wrinkles she refuses to let form. Grey speckles her with age. She wears a suit jacket and a pencil skirt the color of a dull sky. A strand of pearls at her neck have long since gone bland and yellow. 

She sneers at him, and her red tinted lips, perfect, prim, proper, create words around eyes as green as envy.

“Did you really have to wear that? I thought I told you to wear something presentable.”

“This is.” He plucked at his shirt. It’s one of his best. A soft Led Zeppelin shirt that has long since begun to look its age. Black jeans, worker’s boots, all his scars and tattoos on display.

“You didn’t have a _suit_.”

“I do…”

“And?”

“And… I thought this would be better?” Better to see what she’s giving a baby to, at least. Part of him had hoped some tiny hope that she would have seen him and sent him out. _You’re unfit!_ she’d have cried, shoving him out the door. He’d have made a show of being angry, would have at least found a way to seem like he was distressed by the whole ordeal. And then later he’d treat himself to some a good beer.

But instead she rolled her eyes. Gestured him forward. “Come along then.”

They seat him in an office by himself. He nearly paces a hole in the floor by the time they get back, carrying a pink, swaddled thing. “She’s not well,” Miss Matron reminds him, standing beside the doctor. Bog wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans. Nods. “And you’ll have to show us proof of a job later on. Make sure you can support her for what time she’s got left.”

“I…” he swallows, his gaze flickering to the matron before moving back to the pink blankets. He can’t take his eyes off the little bundle. “I’m an artist.”

“I mean a real job.”

“I do tattoos.”

She looks like she’s about to repeat herself, but sees no need. Rolls her eyes and gives the attendant the okay. And then he’s being handed the pink bundle, wiping his hands along his jeans one more time before carefully (fearfully) taking her. “Careful of her head,” Miss Matron says. “Try not to drop her.

He does his best to find the words to snap back.

But he can’t.

Oh fuck he can’t.

“Hi…” he chokes down to the tiny thing, wrinkly and strange. He moves the blanket away from one of her hands, and it reaches out to grab at his finger and hold tight. “ _Hi_ …” he says again, not caring if it’s the most spectacularly stupid thing to say to a baby. Not caring about much anything at all. 

* * *

The next few moments really are a strange blur filled with instructions and prescriptions and mental instability.

And, for some odd reason-

(not so odd, his mother would tell him later)

-complete and strange and wonderful love.

* * *

She’s small. Too small. He _knows_ that. 

A tiny thing that’s wrapped in a pink that very nearly matches her new skin. She’s wrinkled. Every bit of her. From the tip of her head bearing new, blonde curls of spider silk to her little feet that kick and fuss through their bindings. They’ve dressed her in a thin outfit, and she’s got an acorn cap on her head. 

She’s drowning in all of it. 

He fits the cap more to her head, pulling it back to reveal closed eyes. She cries, a soft, quiet, hiccup of a cry. 

He falls in love.

* * *

They’d given him looks after passing over the frail, undernourished thing, taken away from its mother with charges of neglect and abuse. Bog still remembered the way the woman who’d arranged it all had looked at him. _She’s not going to survive a day,_ her eyes seemed to jest, cruelly watching the nurses show Bog how to properly hold the baby, crying in silent coughs and choked exclamations. _And then perhaps this confidence of yours will falter once you’ve got a dead child on your hands._

There hadn’t been a chance of that happening. Not after he’d had the child in his arms and could only think of a million different ways he was going to keep her safe for the rest of her long, happy, wonderful life. How his wife had never once said I love you enough for him to learn how to say it, but suddenly he’s sure he could speak it in a thousand tongues if the child merely opened her eyes. He didn’t even give himself a moment to glare at the Social Worker, just staring adoringly down at the horribly small child, watching her cling to the fabric of his black shirt, tugging it in her shivering fist, sucking greedily on the corner of the L. He remembered thinking that Zeplin wouldn’t mind a bit that he was being used as a teething toy for a three week old baby, and hugged the girl closer.

“The mother didn’t name her,” Miss Matron pointed out wryly. “So if you’d be so kind-”

“She didn’t name her?” His head whips up. “So… so Ah get to-”

“That’s usually how naming works, Mr. Bog,” she’d answered sourly. “And I have many other children to visit, so if you can please just look on a naming website or something, it’d be much appreciated. In fact, I think we have a binder around here. Why don’t you just choose a name and-”

But he already knows what he’s going to call the pink, wrinkled thing, still eating Led Zeppelin’s filigree off his shirt.

They don’t care for his choice. They dislike it even more when he explains that he’d named her after a Joan Jett song. He’d been listening to it on the way there, drumming his fingers along with the haphazard beat, trying to make his heart stop it’s sporadic jumping. It hadn’t worked. But that was neither here nor there.

“You’re naming her _Clover_ ,” the woman scoffed. “You couldn’t have just picked a normal name?”

“It’s a good name.” The baby hiccuped against the _L_. He smoothed his hand back through her downy hair. “Joan Jett would have approved.”

“Joan who?”

“You know. I Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll? Bad Reputation?” Miss Matron raises a brow. “Crimson and Clover?”

“What are you going on about now?”

“Nevermind.”

She sighs, and reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Before you make any rash decisions, please remember that these children are with their names for the rest of their lives. Why not at least confer with the mother?”

“Because she’s in a hospital bed being treated with a meth relapse.”

“At least she’d have better sense when it came to names.”

He’d ignored the insult, choosing to focus on the child in his arms instead. She weighed too little.

“Clover,” he told the child. “You’re Clover.” The girl wiggled in his grip, and he took that at least to mean she liked it well enough.

The woman huffed, but wrote it on the appropriate lines. She sent him home with a stack of paperwork in a manilla envelope and gave him the place he needed to send it to for all the correct name changes and rights of guardianship. “She’ll be gone before you finish,” she pointed out cruelly, crossing her arms and scowling at the child. “She’s not a healthy child, Bog. Do what you can for now. But don’t expect much.”

He makes it his personal mission to prove her wrong. For once, not out of spite. But out of something else.

* * *

He’s already stocked his home with baby formula, and so he calls his mother after fitting the bottle into the girl’s mouth, watching her weakly suckle at the thing, reaching up shivering limbs to attempt and grasp the side. Griselda picks up on the first ring.

“Do you have her?”

“Aye, mother.”

“And…”

He rolls back his shoulders and closes his eyes. “She’s… she _here_ , Ma.”

“Oh, Bog!” _See, I told you. I told you, I told you, I told you._ “Isn’t she just perfect!”

“No one is.”

“Give me at least a little creative room, son! All babies are perfect! _Especially_ yours. That’s how parenthood works.”  

He swallows back a sad sound, bouncing a little when the baby begins to fuss. “They told me… they said she wont last very long. They couldn’t keep her in the hospital, but… she’s not gonna last long, ma.”

“Oh _pah_. You were a terror to deal with, and I kept you alive, didn’t I? Your father, bless his soul, was a hard man, and so are you! She’ll be fine with you. She’s just like her father.”

“I’m not actually her father, ma.”

“You are now, aren’t you?”

He’s not really sure. They told him that he might not have been. _Temporary_ , was the foul word of choice. But he still holds the child closer, adjusting the bottle. “What should I do, ma? She doesn’t look… healthy.”

“She was born with drugs in her, son. She’s not gonna be.”

“So-”

“So you take care of her. That’s all there is to it. You take care of her, and you love her. And if this is all the time she has, make it good.”

He’s not really sure if he can do that. He’s never been the expert at making things good, and he’s not even sure if he wants the last thing this child remembers to be his face. She’s been dealt a bad hand of cards. And she’s fallen straight into the Dark Forest. And his face… it’s not something that should be made to be all she sees.

Still, if he’s all she has…

“You’re all I have too, now,” he tells her, not sure what to do other than move her up and down in his arms. Her eyes are still closed, and her hands move about in jerky, uncoordinated motions. “We’re all we’ve got. So… let’s make the best of this. Together.”

The girl let’s out a little hiccup, and he hopes dearly that she agrees.

* * *

He imagines that it’ll be as easy as he hopes. That he’ll take her home and settle her down and she’ll fall asleep and that’ll be that. He’s not sure about children. He’s not much sure about many things, and when it comes to love he’s practically hopeless. The word temporary plays a scratched record in his mind. He’s not sure if it should make him terrified or relieved. But for now he just hopes that everything will work itself out. That life will work out all the kinks and knots for him, and he’ll be left with a clear strong of thought.

But apparently life hates him.

And, subsequently, her.

That night, she has a fever. She’s too small, and her body burns too hot and too much, her heartbeat light and fluttering and too faint. And Bog can’t remember being so scared in his entire life as he was when he held her against his chest in the bedroom, rubbing his hand up and down her back, pressing a cold rag to her tiny body. She won’t eat. And she doesn’t sleep. She just lies on her back and breathes out with ragged huffs, letting out little choked cries and gurgles. Her limbs give little twitches.

Her hand never lets go of his finger.

“Yee’re gonna be fine,” he tells her, rocking her in the dingy kitchen. He’d gone down to get himself some tea. All the lights are on except for the one over the counters, and it’s hazy and flickering. Outside the moon is covered in a thin film of clouds. “Yee’re a strong one.”

He calls the doctor at three in the morning, the hospital answering the phone briskly, quickly, snapping at him on the other line.

The entire ordeal-

(“she needs help. help her. she’s sick. help her”)

Leaves him-

(“we already said we can’t do anything about it” - “her! she’s a her!” - “we can’t do anything about it, sir.”)

Hopeless.

(”yee’re gonna be akay, Clover. yee’re gonna be akay, ya hear me? yee’re gonna be fine, love.”)

When nothing works, when she gets sicker, hotter, weaker, smaller, and he’s resorted to holding shards of a mirror he’d been reserving for an art project beneath her nose to watch it fog (barely there, in and out), he grinds up aspirin and puts it into the baby formula, managing to get some into her before she’s back to dozing fitfully. He tells her stories, holds ice to her chest, sings Joan Jett songs.

(I hate myself for loving you)

At four in the morning, hopeless and out of ideas, he falls asleep on the couch with her still against his chest, her little breaths puffing against his neck (in and out, in and out), rock songs crooning in the background.

The next day isn’t better.

Or the day after.

“Is she gone yet?” Miss Matron asks over the phone, crackling from a coffee spill she’d hissed and cursed about just hours before. “She’s sick, isn’t she? The girl?”

“She’s doing better,” he’d lied through his teeth. Clover whimpered, and he shushed her softly, bouncing her against his side.

“Are you quite sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” She hummed. The phone sputtered. “Best of luck to you then, Mr. Bog.”

 _She’s going to die_ , goes unspoken, but he can hear her.

“Thank you,” he says.

 _I know. But I’m not going to let her._ And she can hear him, too.

“Ah’m a selfish bastard,” he tells Clover when he slams the phone down, his own skin steaming with anger. The sink sputters to life, and he’s clambering through his little freezer for ice cubes, slamming a wooden spoon on a plastic bag of baby aspirin, pouring the powder into another bottle. She shivers in the bath and he tips the bottle against her lips, her refusal filled with choking cries. “Ah’m a selfish bastard, and yee’re not goin’ anywhere.”

It’s a long night. An awful, stressful, long night and neither foster nor babe sleep an inkling. Not until the sun peppered the sky with dewey kisses, pressing through the mist round the dead flowers still holding fast in his yard.

He wakes up with little fingers poking and prodding in his nose. Leans back. Sneezes. “Well hullo there,” he said, pulling her hand away. She scowled up at him. Her eyes are open. They’re blue eyes- bright and clear for the first time in a week. He touches her back. It was cool. Sticky with old sweat, but cool. He smiles. Really, truly, smiles. “Look who finally decided ta wake up!” She scowls again, and pokes him in the eye.

“I told you,” his mother says gleefully, and he doesn’t tell her that he’s smiling enough to break his face in half, managing a little grunt of agreement instead, balancing Clover on his hip while she busied herself with sucking on his shirt sleeve. “Strong. Just like her dad.”

“You’re a strong one, right?” he parrots back to the babe on his side. Clover blinks up at him with blue. She’s not his, but they both have blue eyes, and he’s not sure why that somehow makes him so incredibly happy on its own.

* * *

The next week, Clover’s still there. And by the time the social worker shows up with a packet of official looking papers of temporary living, wrinkling her nose at the house that Bog had done his best to clean up and look at least somewhat presentable, Clover has decided that she’s good enough to lie on her back and kick at the mobile he’d made her, hanging little sculptures of goblins and fairies by silver strings.

“Thought you’d have had a dead child by now, Mr. King,” she clipped, handing him a pen, watching him scribble his name with a shaking hand. “Suppose I was wrong.”

“Yes,” he says, writing down the name - _Clover King_ \- on the dotted line, relishing the way it looks before sliding the paper back. “I suppose you were.

She was wrong. Clover wasn’t gone by the time the last signature was filled out.

But her mother was.

“It’s alright,” he tells Clover when he gets the news about his wife’s passing. He’s a widow now, which is an odd title that he really hadn’t wanted. But he’s had a lot of titles in his life that weren’t generous ones, and this is just another on the list. He had adored his wife. And for a time he had been willing to give up on all forms of love to spite her. It would seem, though, as if an exception had been made. “We have each other, yeah? Yee and me. Against the whole wide world.”

Clover just sucked on his shirt.

* * *

It takes him exactly four weeks, three days and seven hours when he realizes exactly what he’s become.

He’s clogged up the kitchen sink with a towel, sitting the little girl in it, raking baby shampoo through her slight, blonde curls. She’s gotten bigger. Can’t quite support her own weight, but has enough coordination to at least splash at the water around her, looking up at him and smiling hugely when he snorts a laugh.

Some of the soap gets into her eyes when he’s working it through her little fingers and she starts to wail.

“Oh _no_ -” There’s a soft towel folded and ready on the side, and he washes her off with a slow stream of warm water before picking her up, swaddling the little thing up, bouncing her up and down, muttering hushes and apologies. “‘M sorry, Tough Girl. Your da’s a right idiot. It’s okay, shh- Da’s here-”

_Da._

He stops. Clover starts to wail again.

Like a deal written in blood with Fae from the old land, he finds that a single word is enough to seal a pact he had unknowingly become a part in.

The moon’s high up in a cat’s cradle of nebulas, and it watches- a silent witness.

Bog grins.

“It’s alright, love. Da’s here.”

* * *

It takes him five weeks to realize that she’s gone from a girl to his girl. There’s more care put into everything. Toys are chosen with the thought of will she like it and her onesies are all bought after careful thought. His favorite one is a little, soft, cotton thing that’s black with red stripes- the word rock star on the chest.

She prefers the pink one covered in dinosaurs.

Their tastes vary a smidge.

He sells and commissions more of his actual art in order to pay for food and toys. He takes extra shifts at the parlor, keeping her in the back room in her chair, checking on her between clients. And on a random Wednesday, after settling Clover down for a nap on a blanket he’d spread out against the hardwood floor of the living room, he finds himself looking through real estate sites for better housing options. Checking off boxes that say two bedroom (a nursery is a must), better school (she’ll be the top of her class), a bigger yard (what’s a child’s house without a yard to play in) and pet friendly (because one day it might actually be worthwhile to get that pit bull he’d always dreamed about as a friend).

He ends up taking her house hunting. Which was, he decided later on, a good idea.

He can still remember the way the agents had stared at him and his wife (former wife) when they’d strolled into the small development office on the corner of a street that housed a sex store and a laundromat, looking the part of the King and Queen of some dark, foreboding forest. Bog still wore black, and he did little to cover up tattoos and scars. But for some godforsaken reason, the agents were a lot nicer to him when he had a toddler strapped to his front.

“ _How old is she_!” a woman asked, bending town to tickle Clover’s stomach. Clover swatted at her necklace, gurgling.

“Ugh, near three months. Did ye have a house ta show me?”

“Aw, where’s the mother!”

“She’s-” ( _gone, deceased, dead from an overdose, a meth head with a penchant for leaving_ ) “-not around anymore.”

“Oh you poor man.”

“Ah’m fine. Thanks. Did ye have a house-?”

Another agent strolled over, a file in one hand, his other one tickling the baby’s chin. Bog balled his fist to keep from swatting him away. “So… you’re raising this precious thing? All on your own?”

“ _Yes_.” His teeth would be gone soon from grinding them that much, he was sure.

“Just you and her, huh? In a big house!” The woman looked down at Clover for a moment before looking back up. “That is what you’re looking for right? A house.”

“I mean… I was hoping.” Clover wobbled her legs, hitting him in the stomach from her place on the front carrier he’d bought just days before (yer daddy needs ta keep his hands free. It’ll keep ye from boxing daddy on the nose.) “I’ve had an apartment b’fore, and my house is rubbish. Need a fresh start, y’know?”

“Oh I do.” The other nodded in agreement. “We have some places on the market that would work well.”

It was all worth it when the agents had lined up an assortment of small houses all in his price range. Nicer than when he’d went in with his wife. He’d stayed the same, but the new arrival was an apparent hit with anyone who came near. And it thought from time to time he might have felt a good urge to strike them, there were advantages. Like when the two agents had looked up with enough admiration to build the wall of china right there in that office and had patted Clover on the head in a way that said well aren’t you about to save your father some cash. “I think, Mr. Bog,” the woman said, a twinkle of hopeful mirth in her eye, “that we can strike up some _very_ good deals for a single parent like you.”

“You’re a good use ta me, you know that?” he tells Clover later, sitting on a picnic blanket in the park. She just shoves her whole fist in her mouth, blinking at him. “Be glad I keep ye around. Yee’re gonna get me some good money breaks, ‘parently. An’ I never pass up good money. Especially from nitwits like them.” He squints. “Can ye say nitwit.”

She makes a noise around the fist.

“Didn’t think so.” 

* * *

“She’s not talking yet,” he tells the social worker when she arrives later in the afternoon. There are boxes everywhere, preparing them for the move. He’s bought them a small house in a better part of town. It had a garden out front, and he’d already purchased packets of different flowers and plants that would do him the most good. Ivy and Primroses. He’d be able to keep his alive. They had a backyard with a porch and a screen door and a large, dying tree that would do wonders for a swing one day if he could find a way to stabilize it.

“She’s only five months.” The social worker looks at the boxes and hums like he’s got his hand in the cookie jar, tapping a pencil on her paper and writing something down.

“When are they meant to start?”

“You mean you haven’t checked.”

“Neigh- not yet.”

She hums again at that and writes something down. His gut clenched. He looks down at Clover at his side. He’d gotten her dressed for the occasion; a pink dress with bows and lace that’s covered in more juice stains than there is fabric. He’d done his best to comb her small swath of hair, but apparently it wasn’t to be tamed. She gurgled up at him. He tapped her nose. Wonders if maybe a dress covered in juice stains was such a good idea. “When… when are they meant to start talking?”

“Don’t really know.”

“You work with kids…”

“I work with _adults_ who have kids.” She nearly bumps into the coffee table and scowls. She’d worn a tweed suit that day, and it blurs when she spins about. “There’s a difference.”

He can’t see one. Not really. Not now. It may have once been like looking at a lawn chair and a settee for Bog, but now he just sees a kettle and a pot and a child at his side. “So… when-”

“ _Oh for goodness sakes!_ Maybe at nine months, I don’t know! Some start early!”

“Five months early?”

“ _Maybe_.” She throws her pen into her bag with the sound of an avalanche and turns on her heels, scuffing the carpet with a sort of destructive pride. “You need to stop asking questions. And start instead looking for ways to stop getting attached. I warned you, Mr. King that situations like these are risky, and yet you still thought yourself able-”

“I am able!”

She motioned to the boxes and the lease sitting on the coffee table, freshly signed, the ink still sheen with new beginnings. “Then prove it!”

The door slams on its way out.

As his resolve is slipping, watching her pull from the cracked driveway, feeling his heart beating a strange rhythm of what-to-do what-to-do in the cage at his chest, Clover begins to cry. 

* * *

“Ye know, that woman is a terror,” he tells Clover later that night while he’s giving her a bath in the kitchen sink. She’d decided to up and roll herself in the nontoxic paints he’d gotten her to practice mobility that he’d plopped in front of her that afternoon to stop her from crying. Which was, he supposed, a way to practice. But it left her clothes soaked in every color imaginable, which was going to be hell to get out. At least the tears had stopped. “But so are you. Except you’re a better sort of terror.” Clover splashed the water. It had gone purple, which was apparently enough to draw her fascination elsewhere. “But I suppose she gave you me, which is something, right?”

Clover took that moment to splash him with purple suds. He frowned. “You’re being fussy tonight, aren’t you?” Clover glared. “What? Did I offend you now? Well, I’m not apologizing.” Clover slapped the water. “Ugh. You’re bothersome, you know that?” He pursed his lips in thought and then leaned in closer. “Can ye say bothersome?”

She slaps his nose.

“Yeh. Okay. That’s fair enough.”

* * *

Everything was fine.

For a while, it was fine. 

For a week it was _fine_.

Bog really begins to despise the word **_fine_**.

* * *

She gives him a scare when she stops moving. 

It’s a day after the social worker leaves, and everything is fine (aren’t those the words that start the _worst_ stories) and then it’s just _not_. She’s on her playmat, babbling on, and then it goes quiet and still. The calm before the storm.

Except there is no storm.

There’s just his daughter. 

And she drowning.

“Clover!” He’s shaking her lightly, lifting her tiny body to him. She’s not there. Not really. And when he buckles her into her car-seat, speeding to the hospital, she lolls about like a dolly with its stuffing torn out. 

His life is going to be filled with doctors.

That’s what they tell him when he brings Clover in. 

That his life is going to be _filled_ with doctors.

“She’s a drug baby,” a doctor says, poking and prodding at Clover, who swats at him, her little faced pinched in annoyance. They’d been able to give her something. Dehydration, they’d explained, from a fast system with a quicker metabolism then it had immunity. “That’s what we call ‘em, at least.”

“Lovely,” Bog droles, glaring at the man, who doesn’t seem to much notice. 

“Mmm, it’s all we can call ‘em. Kids born to druggies. Her mother was-”

“My wife.”

The doctor at least has the common sense to look a little ashamed, but that goes away quick enough when Clover let’s out a gurgling noise and he’s back to looking her over, pressing the flat end of the stethoscope to her chest and listening fast. 

“You want the truth or the truth?” It’s later when he’s writing something down on a prescription pad, Clover bouncing on Bog’s hip, that the news makes its full arrival. 

“Lie.”

“Your daughter is perfectly healthy.”

Bog’s jaw twitches. “ _Truth_ , then.”

He rips the page from the pad and hands it to Bog. “You’re life is gonna be doctors.” He hands the sheet to him. “She’s still underweight. She’s always gonna be. Too small, yunno? It’s like her body’s craving a drug she’s never taken. It’s in her blood. Mother left it there. _You_ just experienced your daughter going through _withdrawal_.”

Bog’s throat bobs and catches and baits. “So… so what’s gonna _happen_.”

“Nothing much.” He shrugged, clicking his pen a few times before pocketing it. “She’ll grow up. You’ll grow up. That’s all you two can do. Just be glad you’re not on drugs. She’d have no chance if you were. But, you know… now she at least _has_ a chance.”

“… a chance…”

“She’s never gonna be _healthy_ , Mr. King. She’s a flight risk, you know? Which is… which is pretty ironic, because her heart is a fucking _wreck_. Weak as hell. Sorry to sound like an ass about it, but it’s true.” Another shrug. He turned around and washed his hands, the sink matching the worry that hissed through Bog’s mind. He tucked his child closer. “She’s flightless, the way she’s gonna grow up. She’s _flightless_ with all these health issues. Brittle bones, thin blood, weak heart. But all that makes her a _flight risk_.” He shakes off his hands and turns back to the father cradeling his child close enough to try and fix her. Can’t seem to see that she’s close enough to be fixed.

Can’t give any news to fix her.

Can’t fix her.

“Give her the meds I wrote down,” he says, opening the door for them, ushering the daughter and her father out. Not seeing the way the two of them walked, leaving a trail of _broken_ in their wake. 

Two lost, cracked, mismatched beings, leaving trails of strange, hopeless futures.

“You can pick up stickers and a lollipop in the front,” the doctors says, stepping past them and their despair. Clover taps her father’s face, trying to solve the puzzle of why it had fallen. “Have a nice day, Mr. King.”

And that’s it.

* * *

“You’re gonna be fine,” he tells her in the car, turning around to look at her in her car seat. “You hear me, Clover? Yee’re gonna be _fine_.”

She gurgles a sound that very nearly comes off as _you don’t know anything_. He reaches back and cards her thin, blonde curls. “I luv ya, Clo.”

She gurgles again. _I’m hungry.  
_

He takes her home after that, the train of broken parts following them, always moving forward.

For her, always forward. 

* * *

Griselda bounces her granddaughter on her knee and watches her crack a smile. “She’s a happy little baby, isn’t she!”

“Sometimes. She’s also gotten very good at glaring.” He moved in from the kitchen and handed his mother a mug of tea, reaching down to grab Clover’s doll off the floor and hand it to her. She clutched it to her chest. “She’s also very good at hitting and kicking her da.”

“She has her priorities strait. Don’t you, darling!”

“She also hasn’t talked yet. You think that’s a problem?” He fussed with Clover’s sweater, a little pink and orange thing he’d picked up for her before he’d sewn little velociraptors around the hem, dragging it closed. “I looked online and it said that she should be speaking by a certain age, but she hasn’t said a word!”

“ _Pah_. Ya can’t trust those online website doohikies, Boggy. Babies do things on their own time. Ya can’t force a bird to fly.”

“Well… you can try.”

“And what happens if they can’t? _Splat_. They fall. Which is not what we’re gonna let this little munchkin do.”

“You say that now, but we haven’t tried walking yet. I suspect there will be too many falls in her future.” Clover batted at his hands for attention, and he leaned down to her level, adjusting her sweater again. “ _BOG_ ,” he says, looking at her. “Can ye at least say _Bog_? I do pay the bills, after all. It’s the least you could do.”

She kicks him in the face.

“Yee’re a little deamon, ye know that? And just for that, I wont even give ye any applesauce for desert. See how you like it.”

“Bog! Don’t be mean to her!”

“She’s being mean ta me!”

She kicks him in the face again.

He deserved it

* * *

It’s after the move that he’s really desperate.

“Ye have yer own room now,” he says, showing her the place that she’s to call her own for as long as he’s got her. A tiny place in a tiny house on a tiny street with a child living in it as big as the sun and just as bright. It all sounds like a dream out of a fairy tale.

And maybe it would sound even more like something if she’d muttered a single word of it.

He asks her every day to say a word. Bath. Sink. House. Tree. Mistreated. Bog. Says it slow, making her watch the way his lips move. Giving up when she gurgles some nonsense before handing her her toy and letting her roll about on the carpet. Wonders if there’s something he should worry about, or that she’s just as stubborn as he is and he’s already passed on his bad habits.

He doesn’t have to worry for too long. Because eventually she does talk.

To be fair, Clovers first word, muttered at ten months while sitting in her high chair making a mess out her dinner (“Clover, love, marinara isn’t shampoo”), was actually spaghetti.

“ _What was that_!” He drops his fork, staring wide eyed at her from her place beside him in her little high chair. He’d been grabbing a bite of his own dinner between watching to make sure she didn’t choke on a noodle or stuff them down her pants for the third time that week. But then something new had developed and he’d nearly spluttered through a meatball. “Clover, say that again!” His water spills across the table. He ignores it, wiping sauce from her eyebrow. “Come on, love!”

Well. It was said more like ‘ _ghetti_. But it still had Bog running for his phone, cooing and asking her to say it again-

_Come on, love, say spaghetti again! Come on! Gotta show your gramma that I’m doing decent parenting! Or say Bog! Come on, Clover! Say Bog!_

-which she does. And then she throws a handfull of spaghetti down his shirt.

-But her third word was _da_ (“-da da da!” - “Ma! I know it’s two a.m. but- Did ye hear that, ma! She called me Da! Me! She called me Da! I’m her Da!”)

It’s not Bog. But it was close enough.

* * *

The next two weeks are filled with new words.

First it’s his title. Then it’s his name. Soon it’s favorite colors, best numbers, gramma, and a few that had come out of his mouth when he’d stubbed his toe against the fridge.

She names her doll then when he’d explained to her that the words daddy used when he stubbed his toe were not okay to use, and she’d held up the raggedy thing that she carried along everywhere and announced its name. Which was fine by him. As long as she never uttered them in front of his mother. Or the social worker. Or anyone in a two foot radius.

She repeats vowels, consonants, and has a penchant for holding up foods and announcing what they are like a daytime television host.

But she learns.

And he’s never been more thrilled. 

* * *

The social worker calls once a month. He’s tempted to block her calls, but really, what use is that. She always finds a way to reach him.

“Mr. King,” she says, with the same voice someone uses when they’ve bit down on a lemon. “Hows the child?”

It’s no use being bitter about anything. Not that that stops him. “She’s fine.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” He was kneeling on the floor, her stuffed toy in hand, an ugly thing he’d made for her that she loves more than anything. She kicks at him with her feet and he grabs at her tiny toes, pinching them fondly. “I’m with her right now.”

“Oh are you.” As if she expected him to have left her at home alone with the stove on. He bites his cheek to hold back a growl.

“Aye. Clover’s duin fantastic. She’s on her new meds. Oh! An’ she’s talking now!”

“Da!” she pops out the word as if to prove her point. He wiggles her foot, reaching down, pretending to give it a bite. The child screams a laugh.

“Hmm.”

“Was there something ye needed, ma’am? If not, it’s Clover’s bathtime, an’ she rolled in applesauce this morning so she needs it.”

“No. Nothing else. Just checking.” A scoff. “Please remember to not get too attached though.”

“Oh of course not.”

“This is temporary, Mr. King.”

“Mm.”

“Mr. King!”

“Have to be off! Cheers! Drive safe.” He hangs up when she’s mid yell, reaching down to scoop Clover off the floor. “Not gonna listen ta that mean lady, are we?” She sticks her fingers up his nose in agreement. He sneezes. Glares. “Right. Missy, we’re gonna have ta learn ta control those hands. But first- bath.”

* * *

He does his best to follow directions. He really does. He doesn’t want to become too lost. He’s known heartbreak and it feels red and terrible. And looking at the tattoos that wind down his arms and chest, he’s sure that though it’s the one no one can see, it’s cut the deepest. But children, he’s learning, are something of their own entity. And they decide if you’re ready or you’re not. And Clover decided that he’d never be ready at all.

Not on a cold, wet evening in the Springtime when the Primroses outside his window are putting up a fight against the chill and he’s got Clover in his lap for a bedtime story, when she pats his face and smiles and says two words that utterly destroy him.

“-love da!”

He almost drops the book. Does drop the book. And a fairy with a sword winks up at him from the bookmarked page that glares towards the ceiling as a father holds his daughter close and pleads for her to say it again. Knowing that she can’t. Not if he ever wants to be free from the spell she’s put him under.

But still he asks.

Wonders if she’s cursing him, or perhaps, more likely, that it’s the other way around.

“Love da!” She says again, planting her entire open mouth on his chin for the best kiss she can manage.

He covers her in sloppy, loud kisses, blowing a raspberry on her stomach. “You are a panderer if I ever met one,” he tells the giggling child. “But daddy loves ye for it.”

* * *

It’s right then, ten months in, that he realizes how gone he is.

And at eleven months, when he has her wobbling about their little home, walking on two unsure, bowed legs (come on, love! Few more steps! Walk for da, yeah?), that he considers the fact of him being completely lost.

“Don’t forget, Mr. King,” the Social Worker says, brushing the wrinkles off her shirt, glaring back at the child staring a hole through her with blue eyes, “this is-”

“Temporary,” he snarls, raking his fingers through the blonde hair. “I know. Can ye not say it in front’a Clover though?”

“I just worry you’re becoming too attached.”

She’s my daughter. No shit I’m attached. “And if I am?”

“If there’s a legal battle we’d like it to go as smoothly as possible.”

“And if I fight?”

“It’d be unwise.”

“I’ve never been much of an educated man.” She scowls. He leers. “Can ye find the door, or should I show you out?”

She picked up her bag with a huff on her lips. “You’re a real Goblin, you know that Mr. King.”

“Good day, Mrs Matron.”

* * *

Clover wriggled in his lap until he let her down to the floor, and she hobbled off, no doubt to go find something fun and interesting to show him. He scrubbed his face through a heavy sigh. His phone rang.

“Hi mom.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“You’re the only one who’d call, ma.”

She’s cooking something, and he can hear the spoon hitting the side of the bowl with loud, even scrapes. “So… how’d the meeting go?”

“As well as yee’d expect.” Clover comes back into the room, Stubbs held high over her head. She hands it over to Bog then runs back into the other room to find something else for him. He holds the doll tight in his fist. “She wants ta take her away eventually. If they find the father.”

“Yee’re her father.”

“Not _biologically_ , ma.”

“Well that’s a load of shit and a half.”

“I know, ma.” Clover’s back with a handful of blocks. She’d tried to grab six, but her small hands could really only handle one, and the rest of them lie in a train of breadcrumbs behind her. She passes him the block with a smile. Turns and runs to pick up the others. Falls. Get’s up and starts again. “But if they find her actual da-”

“Stop it with the actual word.” She taps the spoon. “You’re her dad. Ain’t that enough!”

“Not to the state.”

“The state can suck it. You’re her father. End of story.” There’s a clicking sound of her old stove starting up, and he’s brought back to her warm, blue and white, diner style kitchenette- days spent doing homework at the table and his first scandalous kiss by the back door under the single porch light that still flickered and attracted every bug on the block. “I’ll be by later with soup. And don’t you dare say no. I wanna see my grand-baby. It’s been too long.”

“You were here last week, ma!”

“And that’s too long! Someone’s gotta feed that girl!”

“I feed her! We ate cheerios this morning. And she ate spaghetti yesterday for dinner!” Clover looked up quick.

“‘ _Ghetti_?” she chirped.

“No, Clover. No spaghetti today. I just washed that dress.”

“ _‘Ghetti_.” she demanded with a stamp of her foot.

He sighed. “Right. Well, guess I’m making spaghetti for lunch. Again.”

“Ghetti!”

“Good. Because you’re having soup for dinner. How’s matzo ball sound?  

* * *

The world changes for Bog. And it changes quickly.

He has no partner. Not anymore. Not that they’d ever done anything together. But it’s strange to find himself with a piece of her that’s so entirely not her that he sometimes forgets the small thing running about his house is her at all (and run she does- in fact the moment she learned to walk was the same one she learned to run, and then proceeded to trip over every electrical wire in the entire place).

His life had never really been much to look at, he thought. But it was odd. Because as soon as he realized the place in her life was one of permanence was one that he realized his entire life had been created to hold her in it.

“Yee’re all I’ve got,” he tells her one night, his voice like rain on a tin roof, soft and distance and powerful. “We’ve got each other, Clover. Or rather, yee’ve got me.”

There were stories about him- all of them wound about like tattoos, telling tales of the Goblin who lived in the odd house strung with ivy and primroses. But they were all wrong. In them, he ate children and terrorized women. They always left out the flightless fairy with the odd doll that waddled around the garden and melted his wax wings with a single smile.

Her first birthday is not much of a whirlwind of activity. He hadn’t been planning much, but really, how could he not have done anything. The girl was still alive by some miracle, and that was enough to at least supply her a balloon.

And cake.

It turned out that Clover really, _really_ , liked cake.

“That’s never coming out,” he grimaced as Clover smashed a handful of pink icing into her hair, wiping her fingers sloppily down her little green onesie. It had grown. Long blonde curls that spiral about her ears, now filled with icing, tangled and thin. The curls bounce along with her.“You’re doing your own laundry, you know that? As soon as you learn it.”

“She’s just one, Bog,” his mother said, snapping the millionth picture onto her phone, the little low battery signal flashing red. “Stop treatin’ her like she’s not.”

“I know she’s one!” Griselda’s phone died so he grabbed his own, taking a picture as icing fell from her hair onto her eye. She reached up and smeared it about. “She’s grown two whole bloody inches how can I not - _Clover, love, look at da! One picture! Come on Clover! Look ‘ere!_ \- know she’s one!”

“You’re acting like it’s the end of the world.”

“I already told ya I didn’t want ta celebrate her birthday!”

“Every kid needs a birthday party, Bog.”

“Not one who’s gonna be leavin’ me soon.”

“So it’s not about her, it’s about yer stupid need ta stop time.”

He scowled, taking another picture, looking stubbornly down at it instead of the child in front of him, strapped into her high chair, smashing icing onto her bib. “That’s no’ fair, ma.”

“It is, and ya know it. The kid’s leaving and yer trying to keep distant.”

“No I’m not.”

“Ya love her.”

“I do.”

“So celebrate her birthday! Tomorrow is tomorrow but now is now. So stop bein’ an ass and eat a piece of cake.”

He does eventually put down his phone enough to share a piece of cake with his daughter. He uses a plastic fork to cut away at the bits he likes, while she reaches over and grabs fistfuls, shoving them into her mouth and missing spectacularly. And when she misses the fourth time, she ends up getting frustrated enough to shove a handful into his face. He should be annoyed. He really should be. His dark demeanor has been ruined by yellow and pink balloons, his daughter is wearing her green onesie and a pair of fairy wings, not the black and red thing he’d laid out for her, and he’s covered in more cake and drool then he ever thought was possible.

But he’s happy.

His wax wings are melting and he has primroses in his garden and cake on his face. And he’s happy.

“Ye make me happy,” he tells her one night, holding her close as she finally -finally- falls asleep. He presses a kiss to her temple, golden curls that don’t come from his own making brush his nose, and he breathes in the scent of her bath soap and something dark that he’d left behind. She clings onto him, holding fast to the lettering of the Led Zeppelin shirt he’d donned that night, and he very nearly spills over then. “You make me happy,” like a steamed cup of tea, strong and brewing and warm. “Don’t you dare leave.”

His life has become terrible television that repeats names and colors. It’s become pediatrics and hospital rooms with painted children’s characters over the walls. And his fridge is decorated with the pictures she’s handed to him (he’s always depicted as a stick figure and he’s not sure if it’s meant to be offensive or accurate). And there are more stains on his carpet then there should ever really be (sixteen are juices of different assortments, three are macaroni, two are cookie batter and there’s a few that he’s not sure of so he stopped asking questions a while back).

And he’s even got his own clothing he’s dubbed “dad clothes” for days he knows are going to be extra messy. The ones that are affixed with hand prints and chalk and food and buttons sewn on in odd places where buttons had no place being. 

He’s not really sure how his life had changed.

But it had.

* * *

“Daddy!” She runs to him when he comes back from work, the babysitter standing in the entryway with her sticky palm out, asking for a good quarter of his daily wages. His mother comes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but the other days she’s at knitting club or garden club or some other useless thing and he hires the girl down the block to watch his Clover.

His fingers hurt from holding needles for so long, and he can feel that place between his fingers nearly giving way, and he’s had enough unpleasant clients turned away for being plastered when they’d walked in…

… but the moment she’s in his arms, it’s all better.

He’s the king of the dark forest, and she’s the Princess who fell in and was not afraid. And that alone is enough to come back to a story he’s willing to drown in. 

Her curls bounce as he ruffles them. Her smile is wide, her baby teeth small and gapped. She’s wearing yellow pants and a blue shirt covered in orange dots, and he knows that she’s gone and chosen her own outfit for the day and the sitter had most likely gotten tired of butting heads with a brick wall. Which was fine.

Adorably, wonderfully, terribly fine. 

“Did ye have fun tuday?” He plants a few bills in the sitter’s hand without looking, eyes still on his daughter, who holds his hands like little ropes, leading him toward the play room- a sailor on a mission, steering him through the storm.

“Yeah! We watched a movie and I played with Stubbs but ‘manda doesn’t read stories right. You gotta read’a story!”

“I will, darling.”

“With the voices!” she demands, shuffling through the shelves.

“Of course.” He never forgot. 

* * *

The rest of the afternoon is spent with different voices and peanut butter sandwiches. There’s bath time and medication slipped into sippy cups filled with milk (one for blood, two for heart, half for something he’s not even sure of) and their odd daily squabble over which pajamas are the best. At the end of the night he tucks her and Stubbs into bed, pulling the lacey frilly pink blankets he’d been convinced to buy up to her chin, pressing a kiss to her brow. “Goodnight, wee beastie.”

Turns off her light.

Goes to his own room.

His house is devoid of memories. Old ones, at least. Pictures of Clover and him and Clover and him and Clover and Stubbs repeat like a pattern that’s easy enough to follow along- a timeline of picture frames filled anew. His wife is gone. His wife had been gone long ago. And he’s not sure if he’s meant to be called a Widow when married was a term that had been questioned from the start.

But still, as he falls asleep, he can’t help but feel the presence of the cheap wedding ring they’d bought in his sock drawer and the picture frames once filled with a face that had been more present then its owner.

 _Just you and me_ , he always told Clover. And he’d meant it.

He was happy.

He was _happy_.

He had her and only her. A single father in an old house filled with stains and pink and ivy and primroses that will prove as strong as she.

And things weren’t just about to change.

Then, just like that…

… they did. 


End file.
